My other books: The Tao of Spiritual Partnership & The Power of Your Heart: Loving the Self & Emotional Unavailability & Neediness are @ Amazon. "Rewiring the Soul" is now also available in German & Spanish.

"A revelation of insight into the foundations of human suffering & transcendence. It not only lays out essential steps for inner freedom and joy but illuminates the way to true human potential." Paul Rademacher, author: A Spiritual Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe

"The masterwork of a profoundly gifted healer of the soul. Dazzling, challenging, wondrously useful." Peggy Rubin, author: To Be and How To Be, Transforming Your Life Through Sacred Theatre

"Rewiring the Soul is one the best introductions to the spiritual life I've ever read. Not esoteric but real-world and practical. The implications are profound." Peter Shepherd, author: Daring To Be Yourself

Friday, January 14, 2011

The Quality of Every Moment

Whether men or women, many of us take great care of our appearance, our hair, skin, teeth, hands, nails, clothing, and so on. We spend this amount of time on outer aspects for a multitude of reasons, but underlying most of those reasons is the fact that in so doing, we feel good about ourselves.

So it makes sense that we take equally good care of the quality of each and every moment of our lives, but I'm willing to wager a great deal on the probability that most of us simply don't do that. Oh, we'll take great care to ensure that those special moments: a birthday, a weekend holiday, an anniversary dinner, will be filled with quality, but we don't tend to pay that kind of attention to our everyday, regular, ordinary moments.

And yet they too, should be embued with quality.

One of the easiest and quickest ways that I know of to ensure that all of our moments are filled with quality, is to practice gratitude at all times. Wake up and be grateful for the morning, or the pleasure of still being in bed, or the warmth of your down-filled comforter, or the coolness of the cotton sheets, be grateful for the clean feeling in your mouth after you brush your teeth, be grateful for the calico cat that greets you on your daily jog, be grateful for the sweetness of the orange juice as it flows down your throat. You get the idea ... the gratitude being extolled here is not for anything special, it is simply for all those ordinary and yet wonderful things in our daily lives that make them - potentially - wonderful. It's up to you to see precisely that, by practicing this kind of gratitude.

Because - and this is the best part of it: as you make that effort, which needs to be quite concerted at the beginning, to behold and embue those ordinary elements of your daily life with gratitude, this begins to become something akin to a habit, something you do almost automatically, and hence it forms part of the background of your daily life, your very existence, subtly and marvelously influencing, therefore, the quality of every moment.